Google Nexus 5x and 6P
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They have the same resolution, same amount of memory, same amount of storage. I don't shoot video, and I probably won't use fingerprint reader - but I do use wireless charging every day.
I wonder if devices will start to be built better, with more replaceable components as the rate of spec improvements in mobile devices slows down.
I purchased the first gen on release day (2007) and carried it my pocket every day without a case until the 5 came out in 2012. I still have it, it still works.
I bought my iPhone 5 in 2013 and carry it my pocket every day without a case. It has some cosmetic damage.
Not fanboy-ing; I think it's legitimately interesting that most smartphones are still designed the way early cell phones were: plastic case around components, clipped or screwed on, flimsy from day one.
My wife is hard on her stuff; even with a case, her phones (one iPhone, two Android) need replacing every few years.
I don't use a case, and except for slightly lower battery life, my Android phones still look brand-new 4 years later.
Now that Nexus has the fingerprint sensor I'm never getting another iPhone.
I may well buy a new phone, but there is zero chance it will be a 5x.
Can you tell me where you found the battery you are using now?
I'm disappointed by the 5X. I was planning to replace the Nexus 5, but the 5x really does not appear to be a good value. If I can really get usable battery life out of the Nexus 5, I'll gladly keep using it, because there's very little else about it that seems in any way deficient.
I followed this guide (without their tools): https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nexus+5+Battery+Replacement/260...
Turn off Google Fit, turn off always on OK Google hotword detection, clear the Google Play Services cache.
They also just updated the apk file size limit from 50MB to 100MB. On top of that, they made the video camera capture at a higher frame rate which will take up more space.
My iPod from nearly a decade ago has 80GB of storage. I don't want to have an extra device just for music anymore.
If I still had my Nexus 5, I doubt I'd even be considering a 5x or a 6p.
I don't see any official dock for the 5x so far, and most 3rd party ones won't support landscape.
1. an always on sensor.
2. more powerful processors
3. larger battery
4. project Fi support
5. quick charge
This means you probably should only buy Nexus devices when they're new to market, unless you're happy with a 18 month lifespan for your device.
p.s. People please stop claiming what you a fact.
p.s. Being right about not getting update (n7 v1) dos not make your argument true.
> Nexus devices will also receive updates for security issues considered Critical for at least the following periods:
> * Three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store
> * Or, 18 months after the device stopped being sold on the Google Store
p.s. For multiple times when somebody claimed that , their only references was AndroidPolice site , which I don't give shit about . But seems google quietly updated their policy. (which is unacceptable for me as power user)
Not trying to be snarky, but Google's policy is as good or better than most (perhaps all? I haven't heard of a better option, though they may exist) and at least they are completely transparent about it. They also have good policies around keeping the bootloaders unlockable so if they do EOL it and you want to update with unofficial builds, that's an option, just not one they officially support for all sorts of obvious reasons.
The problem with old devices was their lack of power for new increasing computing even for ordinary people (because this industry was infant). But ARM architecture based SoC and embedded CPU will pass (or passing/passed) a threshold . After this threshold you will be able to run ordinary app (I am not talking about high end 3d 4k gaming, I am talking about browsing internet,chatting , reading) for daily usage maybe for 5 year or even more. but your device will become obsolete , because of these thief's . ( I hate how big corporation ripping people off )
Let me give you an instance , you can have a pc desktop with 2gb ram from 2008 . If you are using your device for reading and ordinary job I bet you can install windows 10-32bit (which is state of art) on it and use it without any serious issue . This is the problem with whole ecosystem of Gadgets. Even if you buy a device with tegra x1 SoC(which is powerful as shit) , You should throw it away after 2 year , or you are sticking to old version of android (put aside how much security threat it has) .They can develop a solution for this problem with spending money. But why spending money when they can rip off people ?
Even the handsets that are sold on the idea of open source have spotty records when it comes to supported OTA updates beyond a year or so after release.
Given the lack of any ideal alternative, I'm personally sticking with Nexus devices and just going with unofficial builds of the OS when it makes sense to do so.
I can understand your (and most people) point of view about this problem , but this is not how I encounter with my problems. Personally I am sure non of nexus device (no matter how they will be good) will be my next device . (I am planning to switch device in next month)
The one thing I want to mention and personally I cannot tolerate Google shows himself as savior of us from Microsoft/Apple.But it is not , it is as bad as Microsoft of Apple (I would say maybe even worse than them). I just hate how they can handle media and most people thinks Google is different than any other dirty company out there.
Google literally ripping people off.Google can provide more update to solve the problem(or at least make problem less intense ). But instead they just went to opposed direction. They instead of solving problem. Literally made it harder to solve .
Nexus has so far been the one Anroid brand that people considering future updates were buying.
They should commit to providing updates to the phones forever.
Given the US cell carriers move towards a leasing model for devices, I think there are many people who don't want to pay for updates to 5 year old devices. I don't like that move, I'd prefer to see people paying upfront for cheap devices, but I take it as a evidence that more people want new devices than want updates forever.
$499 for a decent 6 inch phone seems like the real story here. Especially if it gets the typical Nexus price cut 6-9 months out. $449 or $399 for this could happen sooner than later, which would be an amazing deal. $499 is still really good, considering the previous N6 launched at $650. I'm surprised Samsung didn't balk at this, its pretty much a shot at their Note line which typically sells for $600+ unsubsidized. I think Google is trying hard to make phablets happen for non-techies any way they can, even to the point of pissing off their biggest OEM's. I also suspect there's some politicking here as Google is trying to groom Huawei to go after Samsung's massive marketshare. Samsung being the defacto Android product isn't good for Google or Android.
The screen kinda has to be made of glass, and even Dow Corning's finest will break if it hits a hard surface. I believe synthetic sapphire is available for watches and smartwatches but not for any actual phones?
Best solution is a case with rubberised corners.
Extending the bezel to the edge of the phone means there's no "crumple zone" to absorb energy of impacts - that shock goes to the screen.
Personally I think a mobile phone that looks lovely but has little chance of surviving metre drop is a design fail.
Modern phones are stupidly flimsy.
That was also the big era of replaceable phone cases. I think people who are worried about the frailty of the phone buy secondary-market protective cases these days.
I just checked -- the 2nd gen model Moto G is $149.99 on the Motorola website (free shipping). Add a few bucks of tax and it's still one third the price of these other offerings. MicroSD slot, water resistant, 5" display, pure Android experience. This is what the Nexus should have been. Except unfortunately it lacks NFC, ditto the 2015 model.
If it had NFC I'd consider getting one myself, but unfortunately that's a showstopper for me -- I write NFC apps for a living.
If Moto would put NFC in this bad boy, they'd have a killer phone!
Now, the Moto X for $400 does have NFC - plus a microSD slot. Hmmm.
Wireless charging seems to be something very few people use, but those that do love it so much they would not want to trade it. Being able to simply lay my phone on my bedside table at night and have it fully charged the next morning is such a nice thing to have.
But that's a fact about the N5, not the N5X/6P. I mean, what would you want from a new phone that would show up on a spec sheet?
Faster? Check, both of these are. The 808/810 aren't gigantic generational leaps over the 800, but they're significantly faster + 64-bit.
Better screen? They're both bigger; >1080p resolution seems irrelevant on a 5"-ish screen (though obviously welcome on larger screens where 1080p would be under 400 dpi).
More storage? Well, the 6P gives that to you, though the 5X doesn't.
USB Type-C and faster charging? Check.
Better camera? Check.
Bigger battery? Check (2300 mAh for N5, 2700 mAh for 5X).
More RAM? Check on the 6P, the same on the 5X.
Plus the fingerprint thing is probably a bigger deal than you think. Loss of wireless charging is definitely a minus, though.
So that's one downgrade, two specs that haven't changed on the 5X, and six that have; eight of those specs are better on the 6P. That's not a small upgrade, it's just that you have no reason to bother with an upgrade.
As a Nexus 5 user I'm pleased with most of the changes and non-changes. 2GB is fine for a smartphone, and an image sensor with more than double the light capture area per pixel is brilliant, and if it delivers the better photographs will be worth it right there. Losing OIS...I don't think that's a downgrade as OIS was always suspect to begin with (not least because OIS only helps for lateral movements. It does nothing for rotational movements, and of course make subjects stand still. It yielded a tonne of unusable photos).
The only thing I'm really displeased about is the removal of wireless charging. That was a really nice feature.
Between the Snapdragon 810 and 808, the only real items of concern is that the 808 does not have h265 hardware encoding (the 810 does), and its image processing DSP is 12-bit per pixel rather than the 14-bpp of the 810.
non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers.
There reason why is pretty simple.
In an ideal world, you don't want anything running at all. You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". What you want is to wake up, do whatever work is needed as fast as possible, and go back to sleep. Period. Sleeping chips are lower power, by far, than idling chips.
If it's faster to do that work with an A57, it'll generally give you better battery life to do that. Again, this is right now, based on perf per watt/blah blah blah. Maybe someday, in the future, a53's will be so low power vs a57 that doing something else makes sense. But it's not true now, AFAIK.
Instead, they make big-little because they can't really increase the speed of the higher end cores more without increasing power usage too much.
Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question.
An A53 has a much lower ceiling, but a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57. Yes, if you want to run a benchmark the A53 is not a good bet (and is generally worse in a workload power usage), but it is a very good bet for most real world usage.
Encoding a video should not be CPU, so let's get that out of there. Most of the rest is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low.
For example, web browsing and reading, the CPU should be asleep most of the time.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very silly little tasks for A53's to do, but what you listed are not those tasks.
It's more things like "syncing" or something that is a poll loop and event bound, not something that is in any way CPU bound. Period. CPU bound stuff is not something for the A53's in this to tackle. It makes battery life worse. That is what the actual, in-the-field data says.
" a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57"
Truthfully, for most A53 cores, this is true only in the dreams of the chip designers.
"but it is a very good bet for most real world usage."
Then what, pray tell, do you expect the A57's to be doing in this world?
And why, in practice, has big.little and other things not shown any better battery life at all if it's really a better way of doing things.
I have no doubt it may be a better way of doing things in the future, but it ain't right now ;)
That said there's plenty of lightweight threads and processes that are mostly IO or event bound, do very little compute, and will run in roughly the same time on a small core as a large core, but the small cores have a lower static power footprint (base cost to have them powered up at all), so big.little works out well there.
A sleeping core is obviously the most efficient core, however you have said nothing to discount what I said. Putting a core to sleep is a very costly activity, which is exactly why it happens at the millisecond scale.
Before that happens, the core will likely have been frequency scaled to more appropriately fit the window's loading. I mean, we know this is the case right now, and that "run fast and go to sleep" is not the primary policy. It's "run as fast as appropriate for the workload to fill a quantum, and sleep when there is no workload". There are many if not most workloads that are externally bound, or event triggered enough that sleep is completely out of the question and running faster does nothing.
Your words have been used (out of context and inappropriately) to bolster DannyBee when they represent, literally, all that is wrong with Hacker News.
Modern CPUs have many different levels of "going to sleep" and many of them can be switched in and out of very quickly.
https://store.google.com/product/nexus_wireless_charger
Are there better ones out there that don't have as much of an issue with placement? My blind assumption was the problem lies with the phone's limited charging area, not the charger (which I presumed was nearly the whole surface).
1. The wireless charging, while seemingly a small thing, was to me a huge improvement in my experience of using the phone. The fact that I can sit down at my desk, plop the phone down, and it'll just work, and when I get up to leave I can just pull it off my desk. Removing the USB cable interaction made the phone a much more invisible and organic part of my day. Might not be important to others, but I would very much miss it.
2. Lack of removable storage. Small deal but it was a nice quality of life feature.
3. Battery that's hard to replace. My phone upgrade cycle is very long, usually longer than the lifetime of the battery. I'm feeling it in my Nexus 5 right now.
But the main thing that might prompt me to upgrade is just software performance creep. The latest software updates have really turned my phone into a slideshow, and that's getting really frustrating.
But the spec improvements are certainly both appreciated and necessary.
And before some of you say that MagSafe has patents on this, remember that the magnetic catch for a power cord was used on deep fat fryers YEARS before MagSafe [2].
[1] http://www.dxsoul.com/product/wsken-micro-usb-metal-magnetic...
Nexus phones never had an SD card unless you count the Nexus One. The Nexus One really needed it though, since it only had 512MB of storage. Every phone since has had enough it isn't a huge deal.
As with all puchasing decisions, there are tradeoffs, but I definitely don't think it's wishful thinking to want some hardware features common in competitors' phones. Surprising? No, I'm not surprised, but that doesn't stop me from wanting certain features that I liked in other phones I had.
Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't want a fingerprint reader on my phone? I don't want to secure anything of importance with my fingerprint - fingerprints are usernames, not passwords. This just feels like the equivalent of writing your password on a Post-It and sticking it to your monitor.
Aren't these the things where you'd want security?
Buying things on the App Store requires you to type in a password for the first purchase every so often. Then you use your finger print.
My friends often have to share their passcodes with me; at which point it's like, what's this adding?
I guess that I think once you share it a few times and it's used regularly, then it becomes fairly public knowledge. Maybe this is a mis step from password security.
My bank emailed me the other day with an announcement that I could access my account through their app via my fingerprint. WTF? My text messages are one thing by now my money is protected by just my fingerprint? I took my bank to task because they allowed my username to be twice as long as the allowed characters in my password. Someone at the bank said, "Hey, all these new-fangled phones have fingerprint readers, why don't we tap into that and sell it as a feature?" When everyone is doing it, no one is going to stop and ask if they should, it's just a race to incorporate the newest features. Normal people aren't asking if this is secure, they are buying into the marketing copy pushed on them, so they start thinking that it has to be secure, because why would my bank not have my interests in mind?
Otherwise the data is still there in the plain, accessible by anyone who can read the flash.
Android 5 has full disk encryption but was disabled by default on the Nexus 5 (and most other phones) due to performance issues.
I didn't notice any mention of those, specially because they failed miserably last year parading full disk encryption on Nexus 6 and got bitten when reviews showed the performance degradation and lack of hardware encryption.
If it's not, then Google are starting to take the piss..
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-governm...
In my mind, the only reasons tech giants continue to force centralization on their users are PRISM and data mining. Today’s devices have sizable internal drives, so all personal data could realistically be stored and processed locally; and secure, distributed systems have been proven to work for data transfer (BitTorrent), monetary transactions (Bitcoin), message boards (Aether—sort of), and more. Hopefully solutions like Copperhead OS and Blackphone that secure our mobile devices and communication channels, respectively, make it to the mainstream.
I think this misses the point. Accessing a device using a "cloned finger" (not tremendously difficult) can be done without the target ever knowing it has happened.
The wrench technique, less so.
Whyever not? They might have a copy of it lying around. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-governm...
> Yes, but is it worth spending the required resources?
When it becomes easy - and it will become easy, there's nothing basically hard about printing out some ridged plastic - it will become commonplace. And unlike stolen passwords, an attacker can be fairly sure that you haven't changed your fingers.
There's a legal difference in some places between having your phone secured by a fingerprint and a password. If your phone is secured by a password, then in some places you cannot be obliged to provide the password, but a fingerprint you can.
There was a bunch of reporting in the past few days that a Federal District Court in Pennsylvania found that Fifth Amendment rights apply to smartphone passcodes.
Random link: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/why-the-government-cant-...
That same protection doesn't seem to apply to fingerprints. Random link: http://time.com/3558936/fingerprint-password-fifth-amendment...
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but that seems to be how the law falls out on that issue.
Whether that's an issue for you, personally - no idea. It might be a factor for some.
One of the neat things about encryption, historically, is that the government couldn't force decryption even if it were willing to break the law in doing so. That's why there were export controls and demands for backdoors in the '90s, and that's why there are demands for backdoors today. Fingerprint locks may mathematically involve encryption, but they don't have this property.
1. Attacker sees random data.
2. Attacker knows you might be smart enough to use a plausible deniability file system.
3. Attacker starts beating you with the wrench.
At this point, there are several possibilities that could happen:
1. You give up the secret and give the attacker what he wants. The beating continues after this point, because the attacker really has no idea if you've given up the right secret.
2. You give up a fake secret and give the attacker what he thinks he wants. The beatings continue. See possibility #1.
3. You don't give up the secret and he continues beating you with the wrench anyway to try to get you to reveal the secret.
4. You're not using a plausible deniability encryption at all, and it truly is random data, and he continues to beat you with the wrench to make sure.
As you can see, the wrench doesn't give two shits about your plausible deniability.
NOW GIMME MY SHITS
> So that's one downgrade
Two, and one critical. The Nexus 5 was absolutely the biggest phone I would consider, and even that was really too big. Making one phone a dinner plate and one phone a centimeter-larger dinner plate is atrocious.
Apparently only Sony wants my money (and honestly the Z Compact series is still too big).
It's higher resolution, but the 6P is physically slightly smaller; 5.7" vs 6"; (77.8 x 159.3 x 7.3mm vs 82.9 x 159.2 x 10.0mm).
Kind of a letdown the 5X is so large. It is annoying that all phones coming out are trying to outdo each other on the same form factor that's both too large to fit in a pocket and too thin to have a useful battery.
Given a price to stick to, it is very difficult to improve the specs substantially to wow the existing customers. Look at Oneplus one- the flagship killer and its successor- two not considered to be killer at all. I don't think existing customers would want to upgrade to the newer version.
Speaking as someone who does not own a Nexus 5, I would say I am very impressed by the specs and am waiting to purchase it. There aren't many phones better than this (keeping in mind the price).
A lot of Nexus 5 owners have pointed that the newer one does not have wireless charging and OIS. I feel that improving the overall experience matters more. Even though both are nice-to-have features it still does not help the crappy battery and low-quality camera that much. The 5x solves the existential funks first by adding those improvements. And due to the price limitation the nice-to-have features had to be dropped.
* CPU: Processor evolution is stagnating, and processors are so powerful that they can handle most typical workloads with ease. Efficiency is now the order of the day, not raw power.
* Screen: Densities are so high it that not only does it become difficult to manufacture higher density panels, but it actually hurts the device by draining more energy and killing performance and battery life to display pixels you aren't going to see.
* RAM: 2Gb, the standard in mid-range phones and up, is sufficient for moderate use. 3Gb is comfy and 4Gb is gigantic. Again no substantial improvements in the horizon.
* Storage: The more storage the better, but phones seem to have stabilized in the 16/32/64/128Gb, and anyway with cloud storage this is less and less of a concern.
* Battery: A major pain in modern devices, with no imminent breakthrough in sight.
* Camera: Incremental upgrades are looking promising, but there's only so much you can do with optics in a small form factor.
In short, no major improvements or evolutions in the smartphone field are in the horizon, but they aren't really necessary for the short-term anyway.
All the above are requirements, yes (CPU, Screen, RAM, Storage, Battery, Camera). I'd add one more requirement: manufacturers should be required to supply as a part of an extended warranty the latest release of Android. No more orphaning year-old phones.
Once that's squared away, then I imagine manufacturers could compete on features -- things that customers want. Here are some examples:
* Battery life. User-serviceable battery.
* Removable storage
* Wireless charging
* Multiple SIM slots (popular in Japan)
* FM Radio (popular in Japan)
As you can imagine, a phone with all the above would be pretty large, but it turns out customers like a large phone. Sadly, no such phone exists today.
Try the 3D touch on the iPhone.
Adding what is the equivalent of contextual menus to the UI is a major improvement to the overall experience and I know I will be upgrading to the 6s purely because of this.
3D Touch is about how much force you use, not how long you touch for.
be glad your two year phone still feels like current gen. keep your money. don't throw away a product that is full of heavy metals (yeah you won't throw away, but sell. but the person buying will throw his old one away. so it's the same)
but no, let's instead complain i can't consume blindly and constantly. sigh.
Wireless charging is something I use with my 5, but it is slow compared to USB. Compared to type C, is will be incredibly slow. There just won't be a need to charge the phone overnight like the wireless charger did.
The battery life is better.
The resolution is the same. This is a plus for me. I don't need higher resolution on such a small screen. It is already incredible for even the tiniest of fonts. Higher resolution = higher power use, higher CPU/GPU use, and more memory use. It would be fine, but I don't need it.
I will use the fingerprint reader. I'm excited to see Android Pay take off. I hate getting my credit card stolen, and I don't like typing in a code every time I use GoogleWallet or whatever I used to use.
The camera is a big deal. I'm excited for slow mo capable capture. I have a small child, and he is a ham.
I also am looking forward to the speed increase. More cores = more potential concurrency = smoother interfaces.
The primary reason I bought it was because it is financed (0%) over 24 months when you sign up for Project Fi. I get the $50 play credit, get to switch to Project Fi, and I get the phone in 2-3 weeks.
The total cell phone bill w/ 1GB of data and the phone included is less than the $50 TMo wanted for their cheapest plan directly.
Note: I would have gotten the 6P, except it was 4-5 weeks instead of 2-3, and I need it here soon as my cell phone plan is expiring.
If you're talking about thumb-stretching to reach the top of the screen, though, that might get a bit more difficult.
However, I have been impressed by the 6P - I might consider the $550 64GB instead of switching to the iPhone 6S.
I was holding out hope that I would finally have a reason to buy a Nexus phone with the 5X or 6P, but now that we have the final spec sheet, I think I'm going to just grab an HTC One M9 or something. The lack of expandable storage really kills it for me.
[0]http://www.android.gs/android-m-feature-spotlight-sd-cards-c...
Also, Google is offering 128GB, which is pretty decent. And their pricing is much less than Samsung's for 64gb vs 32gb.
When has an SD card failed before every other part of the phone, including USB port and screen?
[1] http://anandtech.com/show/9662/iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-...
I think Google has decided to ditch SD cards to encourage users to keep more of their data on Google's servers.
Do you think apple never supported SD cards because they wanted more people to put stuff in icloud?
Uhh... of course? Both companies charge extra for more space — Apple past 5GB and Google past 15GB. They make money by forcing you to upgrade your online storage.
And I guarantee you Samsungs SSD options are faster than their phone flash, because they go for performance way more on desktop parts.
Itty bitty little tiny chips? Your desktop 512GB 850 EVO isn't going to fit into the space a smartphone has for storage.
This line of reasoning makes absolutely no sense. How could having the option to use an SD card with your device make for a shittier UX. The use of an SD expansion slot is completely optional, if you don't have the desire to use an SD card it has absolutely no bearing on the UX, and if you do, no matter how shitty the UX, it will always be preferable to the absence of removable media capabilities altogether.
There are opportunity costs for everything, but microsd readers are a cheap, mature, commodity technology that's been in top-end phones for ages, its impact on the phone's available real-estate for battery and memory is nearly negligible.
Internal storage is faster and more reliable so I think you're always going to see more and more phones, especially flagships, not offer expandable options.
If they want me to ever buy an SD card-less phone, they better start shipping 256GB options at the real cost of the flash memory involved (ie, $40 more expensive over a 64GB option, not $100 or more).
When you are shipping phones with cameras nearing 20+ MP where you would fill up the paltry internal storage (what, like 10GB after OS on the 16GB models?) in a thousand photos at PNG compression (ie, about 10MB a shot) you are doing it wrong, especially when SSD manufacturers are about to start shipping 4TB options in m.2 form factors (ie, the size of a small candy bar).
Still, SD cards are still fine for storing large amounts of photos, videos, and music. And as a proud father of a 1.5 year old, I like to stash a lot of photos/videos on my phone.
their user experience has always been terrible.
The other obvious reason is that phone manufacturers like to overcharge on extra storage.
I think you're always going to see more and more phones, especially flagships, not offer expandable options.
Not everyone is moving in that direction. E.g. the new Moto Xs support SD cards, while the previous generations didn't.
But that's just an easy software fix away. There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually,
See, you're thinking in terms of UI but I'm talking about user experience (which isn't just UI). It sounds like they essentially fixed the UI type of issues in Android M but SD cards are still slower, once you install it you really don't want to ever remove it or if you do god knows what happens now that the storage is unified and good luck explaining how to use and install one to a non-tech savvy person. After working years in retail I don't believe the majority of customers for digital cameras understood cards let alone _optional_ cards in phones.
But android phones don't currently have the ability to behave as a simple USB drive when you plug them into the computer.
So if you're even a little bit discerning, and you refuse to install silly helper apps and photo-importers and android-buddy programs on your computers, you need some other (sane) way to move files on and off the phone - and that is the SD card.
They're just files. You don't need a little helper app or to open up iPhoto and "import" or any of this silliness. You just need a dumb block device that you can move back and forth.
* The removal of SD cards from mainstream phones
* The use of ext4 as a main filesystem on a lot of phones.
The removal of SD cards meant that you could no longer "unmount" part of the phone filesystem to present it as a mass storage device. The use of ext4 meant that many OSes had no idea how to mount the storage, even if you presented it as a block device.
I'm not sure anyone will read this, but I think you could implement a FAT emulation layer over USB Gadget, at least enough to get car head-decks to play MP3s off the phone. If anyone wants to take a crack at this, please get in touch with me.
Also, Motorola and LG both have flagships with expandable storage. Everyone runs out of 32GB, and having an SD card handy to make more on-device storage available can only improve the user experience.
Samsung sold a lot more phones when they used to have sd cards.
64GB Nexus 6P: $549
64GB iPhone 6S+: $849
So, you really shouldn't expect the Nexus 6P to be using the top-tier internal storage solutions Samsung rolls out as used in the iPhone and Samsung phones. Yes, a lot of that $300 price difference is for the Apple name, especially when you factor in the lower resolution 6S+ 1080p screen. But quite a bit of it is used for the polishing bits that make the phone faster... like much faster storage.
As a data point, the high-end Sandisk 64GB microSD cards are about $50 and are around 3x faster than the internal storage in my Nexus 6. They're hitting 95 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write now.
While a microSD won't top out at the 200 MB/s you get from last year's top-tier storage available in the Samsung S6 and iPhone 6 (not to mention the twice as fast Samsung storage in the new iPhone 6s and upcoming Samsung phone), they'll perform better than the internal storage in most mid-tier phones and all low-tier phones, which is all most folks need for photos and videos.
Even the Moto G has that read speed. More expensive phones are much faster...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9525/the-moto-g-2015-review/3
Also, I wonder what SD read/write speeds are in practice.
Note that everything tested is below the 90 MB/s sequential write speed of a high-end microSD except the iPhone 6s Plus.
From a review, here's the numbers on the 64Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro microSD using CrystalDiskMark:
Sequential Read : 95.325 MB/s
Sequential Write : 90.660 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 89.314 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 75.971 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 7.492 MB/s [ 1829.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.441 MB/s [ 595.9 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 7.472 MB/s [ 1824.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 2.380 MB/s [ 581.0 IOPS]
Note that Ars Technica is using Sequential Read/Write values on 256K which is flawed. It should be larger to be accurate.
What's so terrible about the user experience? I put in an SD card, my phone has more storage space, and I don't think about it any more. Seems like a pretty perfect user experience.
You can move some of that to SD, but not everything. You'll end up with zero phone capacity and a pretty empty SD.
2. Google probably wants to push the idea that any storage beyond local apps should be to the cloud.
(which is comically unviable in Canada, where you're paying $25-50 per 1 GB of mobile data)
---
A year ago, I got a Nexus 5 after a long search for a replacement for my stalwart iPhone 3GS. The lack of SD card was the primary sticking point, and caused me days of choice-agony. In the end, price and "cleanliness" (stock android, lack of shitware, doesn't fight software customization very hard) won out.
SD storage has always been a mess on Android because it was originally added just as an easy way to port music and movies over. It was essentially supposed to be read-only memory. Then of course apps and users started using it and the ugly, messy history is notorious.
FWIW - I'm pro-removable memory myself, for cost & convenience of data transfer
The changes they made could be useful for more than just SD cards.
Everybody likes the idea of having an SD card, but in reality it's just confusing for users.
If you’re saving photos, videos or music, where does it go? Is it on your phone? Or on your card? ... We take a different approach. Your Nexus has a fixed amount of space and your apps just seamlessly use it for you without you ever having to worry about files or volumes or any of that techy nonsense left over from the paleolithic era of computing.
Remember the vast majority of users have vastly less technical understanding than HN readers.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/10/30/matias-duarte-answer...
That also doesn't explain sticking with the same storage options from two years ago, even though prices have plummeted in the meantime.
It's clearly about what benefits Google.
One of my absolute no-compromise feature needs is removable media ... an SD card slot that can accept the new 128 GB cards. This is because my current music collection is 68 GB in size and carrying the entire collection is one of my use-cases.
But ... I also want a non-crapware, pure android phone, and the nexus "reference model" idea always appealed to me.
So here's the new phone, and I need one, and click through, ready to pre-order. And then I see my storage choices are 16 and 32 GB. Like it's 2010 or something.
So I'm ready to purchase, card in hand, full price ... and willing to add on $250 or whatever clown-markup they have for the (non-existent) 128 GB model. And unfortunately we can't do business at all.
Maybe next time.
[1] The best phone I ever had - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone
Right now my solution has been to have a super cheap/small Android phone, install Spotify, and use it in offline mode reconnecting at least every 30 days. I got the phone for like $15 on a Radioshack sale or something.
My hypothesis is, you don't actually need 68 GB of music around with you. In fact, it doesn't confer any meaningful advnatages.
Using http://www.richardfarrar.com/song-capacity-calculator-for-mp..., I can see that 64 GB of music at 256 KBps is around 559 hours of music - I really doubt you'd listen to any meaningful portion of that in a month.
See, I used to have a 64 GB MicroSD card, and keep music with me. But then I just ended up using Google Music, and streaming everything. I can pick anything I want, and just listen to it on demand.
Let's be honest, most people can't tell the different quality wise anyhow, so the quality argument is moot.
And it's not like streaming music chews up that much bandwidth.
Doing it this way means I can listen to my music on any device - my desktop, my laptop, my phone, tablet - etc., my playlists are synced, my most recently played lists etc. And I don't need to worry about having to backup my music (I used to do it on my NAS), or worry about syncing up new files.
It's *incredibly convenient - and I can't see any meaningful disadvantages.
Google Music makes it easy to pin music to the device for the occasional time when you are on a flight and have no wifi.
There is simply no need to cache more than 2-3 GB of music on the device.
Only free software is not practical in the slightest.
I think you misunderstood ...
Of course I will never listen to 68 GB of music.
My entire music collection currently weighs in at 68 GB, and the use case is to have that entire collection with me. I cannot predict what I will want to listen to at any given moment and it would be a long and error-prone process to try to cull it in advance (especially if I have to cull it in half to get below 32 GB).
So I will probably listen to 3-4 GB of music in total every year (or whatever) - I just can't predict which 3-4.
Since I am above the 64 GB mark, I would need a 128 GB sd card, which are available. Further, I see the LG G4 has a 128 GB capable sd card slot and appears to be a fairly nice phone overall, so I think my dollar votes are going there.
It's only been a few years since CBS/60 Minutes went on a veritable crusade[0][1] against Huawei, alleging security and espionage concerns.
However, it's been confirmed since that the modus operandi of Western intelligence has been to simply to own everything in the telecommunications sector[2][3], so it's not a large leap of logic to imagine they probably have copies of every single IC schematic and piece of software that goes into a Huawei product anyways.
By that logic, a sound conclusion might be that the 6P renders you no more or less vulnerable to Western intelligence, but perhaps far more vulnerable to Chinese intelligence?
This might not be a concern for the average user, though it's something to consider for anyone high-profile or powerful. Of course, doing anything sensitive on your smartphone is generally not a good idea to begin with, but not everyone is tech savvy (or careful). Besides, if a phone is compromised, its owner can still be tracked and recorded against their will anyways.
[0] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/huawei-probed-for-security-espio...
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/update-on-huawei/
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/22/nsa-huawei-chin...
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/nsa-gchq-sim-...
I don't like that the battery is under 3000 mAh but it is only $380...though I guess others are saying that the Moto X Pure and the Xperia Z3 are around the same price point but better?
It's been a great phone, no doubt, and we've loved ours, but it feels like it's time to move on to the next thing.
At least they're bothering to release something about like an N5 this year. This is the first Nexus phone in two years.
Also, does anyone have full specs? I don't see it anywhere.
They mention: "15W of power so you can charge your USB Type-C enabled phones and tablets quickly. Also works with large USB Type-C devices, like laptops.¹".
And the footnote: "¹Wattage is optimized for smaller devices, like phones and tablets. Larger devices, like laptops, will take longer to charge. Delivers maximum charge speed to Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P. Charge time depends on USB Type-C device. Larger devices, such as the Chromebook Pixel, will typically need more charge time with this adapter (Pixel estimated charge time is 5.6 hours at 15W with system off)."
USB Power Delivery chargers can deliver quite a lot more.
*except for a detection mechanism for higher-power cables
I can imagine USB-C only makes this more of a concern, since the USB Power Delivery spec allows up to 5 A @ 20 V.
I'd love to hear what the reason is for not offering a detachable cable ("I don't know why they wouldn't offer a detachable cable" being a completely fair answer).
Funny how (other than current limit) the original iPhone charger cube is still like the gold standard for chargers.
EDIT: Of course, the wattage is too low, so no dice anyways.
the us page has better information, for whatever reason.
Edit: The phone comes with both the charger you linked, and a type-c to type-c cable. No type-c to type-a cable however.
The 5x comes with that charger and a USB-C to C cable.
Samsung has done a great job with the S6, the others like G4 & Moto aren't far behind.
Taking multiple exposures with a camera with an electronic shutter (pretty much all smartphones) is still just a 'trick'.
BTW, the Galaxy Note 3's stock camera app does HDR, I'm sure most phones already did a year ago...
For instance, compare these two pictures taken at the same spot with a nexus 5 and Canon EOS Rebel T2i. https://goo.gl/photos/8ZrXoEC283oJ3NmC9 The nexus 5 one is just way better. The conventional camera struggles to keep even the foreground and midground properly exposed. The nexus 5 gets everything from the foreground to the sky, exactly as I saw it.
Sites like connect.dpreview.com on the other hand are all about the actual photography and cover things like handling, UI and real life performance and results
Can someone confirm the rear shooters on the 5X and 6P are the same hardware? The specs are identical.
Anyway, this is what I got:
The Google Store isn't available here yet.
At least it did for me. Even let me sign up for a waitlist.
Nexus 5X: 147.0 x 72.6 x 7.9 mm ( Front face 10,672.2 sq mm)
The front face will be larger. The only way it is smaller is the reduction in thickness.
[EDIT] My mistake, thought you were talking about the Nexus 5
I cannot believe there is not a (huge) market for small, portable phones that you could put in your pocket without altering the way you sit.
There isn't a huge market for small portable phones because most people shelling out $500+ for a smart phone want to actually use it as a smart phone. They play games, watch shows and movies, read full novels, and browse the web. These are all experiences that are enhanced by having a larger screen. My wife upgraded to the iPhone 6s from her old phone (5s maybe?) and one of the first things she said about it was that the screen was small, despite it being considerably larger than her old phone.
I cannot understand how the "I want a small phone" crowd don't realize that they are in the minority.
Or, don't use the phone that much but like access to a decent browser and apps when we do need them.
I have a 4, but actually miss my ancient G2 with an actual keyboard. Damn you kids and your touch screens, you ruined everything!
I totally understand why some people want a small phone. But the "I mostly make calls and only occasionally need a browser/apps" is becoming a very niche market.
In my experience 3000 mAh at 5.2" is the sweet spot, as below that you might rarely run out of juice under heavy usage. Above that no matter how heavy your usage is you'll get that whole day (and multiple days under light load).
You can buy an unlocked Sony Z3 for $400 right now (32 GB storage).
A simple google search yields links like this: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1091325-REG/sony_1289_... which is $560.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-XPERIA-Z3-D6616-32GB-Black-GSM-...
Source on that?
It'd be very interesting to see how much music people store on their phone when they use services like Spotify. I use it on a Nexus 4 and I've never had a problem with running out of space, but I don't have lots of games or anything on there. I honestly doubt it's much more than 2 or 3GB.
I don't like fragile cloud solutions, so my music is offline. I find it amazingly stupid to tell other people to "just delete some of it, because you probably won't listen to it twice". My offline car navigation takes more than 10 GB, and no thank you, I won't use google maps which are not that accurate in places I go, and require constant connectivity (which makes them useless in foreign countries, or in mountains). My DCIM folder is cca 5 GB after 1 year of usage, and I shoot almost no videos which would make it explode.
FFS, it's almost end of 2015, having 32 GB model as your highest offering is... pathetic.
It seems reasonable that their phones are expected to mostly behave as phones, and not as a large photo/video repository.
Not really. Do you ever travel? Have you ever been on a road trip? Have you ever been on a plane? Have you ever gone camping?
The issue comes up if you use your phone solely as a camera without an accompanying connection for long enough to fill up internal storage without some way to offload it.
It's a situation that won't come up ever for most users of the phone, and as Wifi and Data coverage increases will become even more obscure.
It's especially a problem while cruising - onboard WiFi is slow and expensive, buying a sim per country wastes time.
For anything except Video content (or the need for several months of offline music) 32GB is plenty.
Data abroad is dirt cheap compared to North America. $1.40 for 150mb when I lived in Vietnam. $30 for 3GB in Mexico. Much faster than Canada too.
I don't see any value for me in spotify, for example. In circles around me, spotify & co penetration is well below 50%, albeit most know about it.
And 32GB is plenty except for X Y and Z (where Y is large app collections of games [Hearthstone alone is like 1.5GB on mobile] and Z is music collections where you don't want to spend $50 a month in data fees for things you have on your home hard drive) which precludes anyone using those from buying these devices.
All the cell companies are in a ruckus about how nobody bought 2015 flagships, but when the best storage you can get is 128GB on an S6 without a removable battery or SD slot for an insane like $200 premium over the minimum model you might want to stop price gouging as much if you want customers.
The thing will likely overheat or run out of battery before 60 minutes of 4K video, but still the point stands, something that is featuring 4K video but then limits you to only 32 GB of storage is kind of contradictory.
I feel like this device is saying: "We support 4K video* (*but don't actually try to use it)."
PS - My point about overheat/battery is based on previous phones which claimed they supported 4K video. If you tried to use it the camera would switch off after a few minutes due to overheating, and the battery consumption would go through the roof.
Those are the phones I need to decide between. Current 6 only b/c it should get cheap and the Snapdragon 820 comes out next year, but I'm not sure I can wait a year with my aging Moto X 2013.
I just have no desire to ever switch into the Apple ecosystem, and I've significantly bought into Google's
It'll have Marshmallow, so if it's cheap enough.. it's worth getting it and waiting for the 820 and hopefully new top of the line phones from Motorola and Google next year making use of them.
Personally, i don't care about the "top of the line issue" in this case. As it stands, i absolutely love my N5. It is every bit the phone i want, and need. Price point is, of course, a huge part of it. Is it a $700 phone? Probably not. But my value of it is far higher than retail price ($250).
So i guess what i'm saying is, because i love my N5 so much, i don't "need" better. The N5X just feels like the same (but a bit better) phone, and since my N5 is still operating great, i have no need for it. On the flipside, the N6P is a bit too spendy for it's (personal) value. The Amazon price of the N6 on the otherhand, definitely raises the value bar, for me.
Quality with lower price points (N5 land) just makes me a really happy customer, totally willing to spend the coin.
pros:
- good feel in the hand; not easy to drop
- like the choices for back, etc.
- decent camera for an Android device
- reasonable price
- superfast charging with Quick Charger
- mostly-stock android UI (read on though)
- Motorola UI customisations can usually be disabled
in favour of Android stock version (e.g. Lock screen)
- Motorola software updates significantly lag behind nexus
devices; took a long time to get stagefright security
fix
- over a dozen spontaneous phone reboots for no apparent
reason during last year (i have very few apps
installed, so it seems unlikely to be due to that, and
apps should never be able to cause that anyway)
- catastrophic and mysterious phone shutdown which lead to
rebooting to a black screen, which the only option for
recovering from was a factory reset (which meant I lost
all of the data I hadn't backed up yet, which for me,
was some pictures I had taken but hadn't backed up)
- poor battery life
- signal strength / reliability not as good as my spouse's
iPhone 6 plus; they often have data when I don't, even
though we have same carrier (AT&T)
- Some Motorola add-on software not removable
- Some Motorola customisations conflict with Android
standard customisations which leads to weird UI
interactions problems sometimes (mostly the lock screen)
The Motorola software is indeed annoying, I wish it updated Android editions a bit faster, and specifically the lock screen doesn't interface that well with Android stuff.
I currently have no clue what's next. The Style (Pure) would be the spiritual successor to the 2014, but the Play has a much larger battery and can be purchased with dual-SIM in some EU countries. I was also looking at the Nexus, but I am a bit underwhelmed by the 5X (the 6P is too big for me). I guess I'll look how Motorola is with updates the coming months and then go with the Play.
I think I'll stick with my Nexus 5.
To the moon! Considering it's a six inch phone, how close to my face am I going to be holding this thing?
I wonder what's coming next. 240Hz refresh rates?
Don't give Samsung new ideas for spec boasting.
[0] http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/phones/xperia-z...
It's a cracking little phone and does everything I'd want.
So far as I can tell these Nexus devices won't be released on a carry and I don't think AT&T gives you any discount for not using your upgrade. It would be nice to save $10 a month if you don't subsidize a phone but since I can't I'm leaning towards the S6 because it's $250 cheaper than the Nexus 5x.
Also, did everyone abandon Qi charging? It wasn't necessary but it was one like that was cool about the N4.
I'd definitely have preferred OIS, but I'm not convinced that it's a dealbreaker just yet.
That's the same numerical point, but gouged for living in the UK. The cheapest phone to purchase in the UK is about $515 dollars. Yeah, no thanks Google.
Excluding VAT, the UK prices are a bit closer to what you'd expect.
As an example:
The 16GB Nexus 5x, excluding VAT: £282.50 US price, converted to GBP: £249.65
So while there's definitely an inflation to the price, it's not nearly as much as it seems.
Well, not until you realise that sales tax in most (all?) states is dramatically lower than the 20% we have in the UK. But we only have our government to blame for that.
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2015/07/28/qualcomm-b...
I think until they solve the range, alignment, and random hotplate issues that Qi is not ready for prime time. If they suddenly solve all of those issues I'll be gluing Qi chargers underneath every surface I own.
I guess my objection is that the effort necessary to align the device on a pad. It requires as much effort aligning as plugging it into a micro USB connector albeit it's only a 1 handed operation.
When I saw that 5.0 had been pushed, I upgraded, thinking that Google had vetted the release. Instead what I had was wifi that never stayed connected and seg faults ALL over the place in virtually every app that I used on a regular basis, including apps developed by Google (hangouts, photos [which were trapped on the phone unless I wanted to connect external and download them], my SMS app, WeChat, Strava, Kindle ect). They broke my phone, no way around it. It was miserable and I stuck with it, because I paid for a premium device and wasn't about to go blow another $650 on another device. Three weeks ago I got the 5.1 upgrade, just shy of a year after it was released. I'm now a firm believer of the shit phone. https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e6643480...
Buyer beware.
Wonder how phone cases are going to handle that placement.
You can always unlock it the normal way with pin or pattern, but it's not as convenient as the fingerprint reader.
Seems like a PITA.
Namely, your defense against legally compelled decryption is significantly weakened via use of a fingerprint sensor, since the phone's unlock mechanism is the same authentication system that the phone's encryption mechanism uses (it would be really nice to have some sort of separation there).
The last drawback, I'll simply quote verbatim from the article:
>What would happen if some government “asked” phone manufacturers to create a back door to store or send it fingerprint information, and to lie to the public with denials of the existence of such a program. Considering the news of the past few years such a scenario seems far from impossible.
On that note, I wonder how compatible smartphone fingerprint data is with data you'd find in a fingerprint database. If not immediately compatible, would it still be possible to convert it to a standardized format?
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/josephsteinberg/2015/03/05/wh-yo...
Second, it's not supposed to be "on the OS". It's supposed to be in TrustZone, the "secure world" separated from the OS. I hope that's what they did, but I worry they may have adopted a more "universal" solution that's a little higher level and less secure (even though TrustZone should be in virtually all ARM chips).
That sounds pretty impressive. How would this be done? You're not going to get the same file by scanning the same physical finger twice.
Fingerprints are recognized by comparing an image to a stored record of salient features, not to another image. But as far as I can see (and I have no further knowledge of the area), you kind of need the actual record, and the identifying information it contains, in order to see if an image matches it.
Compliments of 5.0 Lollipop. It's sad they're going to leave the N4 with that abomination.
The Google Store doesn't do a great job of indicating which kind of customer would prefer one of them over the other, surprisingly.
I don't want to whine but if the guys are reading can you please swap out to https if possible? https://www.google.com/nexus/
I've long felt that a major disadvantage for the Android ecosystem is that the OEMs simply don't have the resources to compete with Apple when it comes to designing new hardware, and it leads to situations where the iPhone is years ahead for certain features. One solution for that is for Google to invest in these technologies and make them available to all the OEMs, a bit like Android but for hardware too. I wonder if that's what is happening here? Looking forward to a teardown.
My phone recently died and i'm in market for a new phone. The 5X looks like a decent one.
Huawei are making their phones a LOT better these days, I have an Ascend P7 that's been working extremely well.
They did do a Volkswagen-style cheat on the FutureMark benchmark:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8403/examining-huaweis-benchma...
so yes, they might be on the "sketchy" camp.
But I've found most of the premium stuff from China to be as good or better than equivalents from other countries, my girlfriend has a Lenovo phone and it's excellent too.
Since I'm from Latin America, I don't have to cheerlead any American or Japanese or European phone brands (we have none), and I'm extremely price sensitive, so Chinese brands like Huawei or Lenovo are great news for us.
At least it seems to be supporting Wi-Fi calling, but makes me curious about their time frame, if ever, VoLTE / Band 12 will be supported on these devices.
[1]: http://www.tmonews.com/2015/09/nexus-5x-and-nexus-6p-dont-su...
Hexa-core is neat, but honestly I'd rather have software polish that meant rotating my phone while using the camera in video mode didn't mean some probability of a system reboot. Unfortunately my experience with both the Nexus 4 and 5 is that the stability is either never quite there or actually decreases dramatically as OS updates come out and Google's focus shifts.
I've experienced what you are talking about, every time I get an OTA for the Nexus 5; the performance seems to degrade dramatically.
We're looking at spending $400 every 2 years to stay every other gen Nexus? That isn't horrible (55 cents a day or so). But if we pay for services to avoid storage on the phone, the cost rises.
Nothing about the CPU/Etc makes me think it's time for an upgrade.
I host my own Subsonic media server which means that I can just set a cache size in Android (5GB right now) and let it automatically download my media as I consume it and push old stuff out of the cache.
Combined with Dropbox camera uploads I generally don't use much more than 10GB of storage on my phone.
I don't understand how they could get such an important feature so wrong.
I don't really care about Android either, it's just a cheesy delivery platform for Google services which I don't want. But none of the alternatives seem much better either... Still, I started looking at Apple.
And it's working, I wouldn't be surprised if first-day 6P purchases outnumber 5X first-day purchases by a magnitude.
I've been scraping by on a Nokia Lumia 530 for about 3-4 months now. Great little phone for 40 dollars, but I'm getting tired of the subpar GMail, HipChat, SubSonic, etc clients that come with having a Windows phone. I figure that as long as the 6P is as good as the original N5, with a better battery life, I should be satisfied for a good long while. I didn't go with the 5X because I am genuinely worried about the subpar battery life again.
https://store.google.com/product/nexus_6p ($499)
https://store.google.com/product/nexus_5x ($379)
Shipping in 3-4 weeks for the 5x (noted at checkout).
(that's lots of very's)
Nexus 6 is too big.
Finger print is not a big deal. They steal your finger print you can't exactly change it. I also get cuts from my fingers when I work out so bandaid and all that would suck badly if I need to verify via fingerprint.
SD card is something I really want not the cloud. Not everybody got unlimited data or even good signal.
There are tons of people that takes pictures, videos and selfies that would like to have a large memory (sd enable this).
All they had to do was a good camera, good battery, fast charge and sd card. The screen could be amoled for bonus.
I have to skip this phone now. Waiting to see black berry priv.
Moto X pure is seems good but their parent company Lenovo got caught with spyware on mobile and laptop (thinkpad included). That's very sketchy.
http://www.motorola.com/us/Moto-X-Features-Active-Display/mo...
I get about 5 full charges on my phone from this - my phone is a moto e though so not exactly high capacity!
Nope.
"Phone is carrier-unlocked with wide-range band support for service providers worldwide. Check with your service provider for more information."
I spend much of my time in wifi, as does my wife, and I suspect we can shave minimum $40 a month off our phone bills if we were both using Fi phones. It wouldn't take long to pay for itself.
Meanwhile, Google is still building phones that are trying to keep up with what are essentially PC hardware specs (memory, clock speed, etc). I'm amazed they think that protrusion for the camera is cool, too.
There are obviously two very different mentalities inside these companies. How do customers get excited about buying a phone that was obsolete months ago?
PC hardware specs are important, my biggest complaint about the iPhone is how little RAM it has. My nexus 5 could support doing simple things like running an email app, web browser, and maps app simultaneously. My iPhone is constantly reloading stuff when I attempt this.
The stylus and touch long-press both predate Apple's usage by years.
All Apple contributed was marketing names.
Styli and pressure sensitivity on Android is a great example of what you are talking about; it literally is the same product someone came up with 10 years ago. Google has not contributed anything to make it revolutionary.
Yes, I take a few pics on the phone per year but that's it. Looking around with friends and family I see the same. Again: I understand that there are lots of people that really do take lots of pictures and videos but I can't help but think that lots of regular smartphone users are not as concerned about the camera quality as the marketing makes me believe.
Additionally, given that most people only have their phone cameras with them and don't invest in SLRs/Mirrorless/Compact cameras, the need for good quality for preserving their memories seems important.
Before smart phones were camera phones and camera quality was a key factor mobile phobe sales. The original IPhone was hesvily criticised for its crappy camera quality.
You and your cricle might not take loads of photos on your phone but me and the gneral public take hundreds.
The best camera is the one that is always with you.
I used to argue the same, but this is no longer true. The cameras are really good now. Smartphone cameras have beaten point-and-shoot. They won't ever beat DSLR, but most people don't need a DSLR.
The future of the camera is the phone.
I think it's very possible that the use case for the people you are around most is as you say. This behavior is contrary to the majority of smart phone users, however.
I'm just saying - and it's fine for you to have a different usage type - that there are people around (even in "tech" circles) that are just not concerned about cameras, pictures and videos. And my feeling is (it's really just a feeling) that it's not clear how many there really are as most of these people are also not active on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr etc.
In other words: I guess my viewpoint is just as subjective as most of yours and heavily dependent on the people around me and you.
Where can I see this confirmed? Any references you can point me to? Thanks for you help :)
http://www.cnet.com/news/googles-new-nexus-phones-to-work-on...
The new thing is cheaper than the old thing, so the old thing must have been overpriced? Is it possible instead that in the intervening time components have become cheaper, Google has been able to negotiate better deals (perhaps due to higher projected volume), and so on?
http://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Google-Nexus-6P-review-Seriou...
1) [Pedantry warning:] Google doesn't make phone hardware. ;)
2) The OLED Nexus S was a really nice phone back in the day. It's still pretty nice today.
So, -in short- I don't agree with your heavy-on-managerial-platitudes sentiment.
Too bad, I was looking forward to it.
Elections have consequences.
Presumably the great mass of your countrymen are happy getting additional social services in return for higher taxes.
[1] http://www.giga.de/unternehmen/gema/news/smartphone-abgabe-3... (German)